AUSTRALIANS’ BATTLEFIELDS RE-VISITED.

Taihape Daily Times, 22 September 1919, Page 5

AUSTRALIANS’ BATTLEFIELDS RE-VISITED.

PEASANTS SETTLING IN PARTS. THE DEMOLISHERS AT WORK. Received Noon. LONDON, Sept. 20. A special correspondent visiting the Australians’ old battlefields in Franco and Belgium, say s that the peasants are striving again to raise corn amid the sbellholes and smashed redoubts. Weeds grow thigh high, amid ruins and tumbled earth. The War JOffice ha s two hundred thousand Germans and eighty-five thousand Chffiese under British officers clearing up the fields and collecting rusty iron, barbed wire, old shells and rails. They dynamite the German redoubts for the steel girders. Old villagers dig among ruins for hidden treasures, and the clink of the demolishers’ tools resounds across the wile valley where formerly battles raged. Souvenirs can still be found in the woods and fields in the shape of tattered uniforms and scattered crosses, marking the gkaves as a general rule Iflong the whole front Where the ground Is hot heavily sheHed agriculture is beginning again, no elsewhere there is no sign, indeed, no hope, of re-settlement. Every yard of the shell-tortured earth will have to he laboriously treated.